PKT Manual of Cartomancy Reference

Barleywine

I'm re-reading the PKT and have been coming across numerous references to the " Manual of Cartomancy by Grand Orient, " so I went looking for it on-line. Found it here for free download:

https://archive.org/details/manualofcartoman00gran

I see it on Amazon, but there are a lot of disclaimers about damaged pages, missing pages, etc. and they want a lot of money for the bound version when it's available for free as an e-book elsewhere. I prefer print books because I don't sit at my computer ALL of the time (well . . .) :) In looking at it on-line, I see that Waite lifted some of his divinational meanings almost verbatim from it, so it might be interesting to have on-hand. There is also quite a bit of highly determinstic/fatalistic non-tarot divination stuff in it that appears to have historical value. (By the way, according to wiki, "Grand Orient" was often the name of a lodge, not a person.)

Does anyone have the print version, and is it as defective as I'm led to believe?
 

Barleywine

Why am I not surprised? In the PKT he professed a distaste for divination and seemed to want to distance himself from it, but some of the material in the Manual strikes me as the most vulgar form of charlatanry, the very type he was decrying in connection with tarot. Looks to me like he was tryng to make a buck (well, a pound or two) off of both worlds, by cross-referencing his own pseudonymous writing. Too bad many of the links in that old forum thread are broken because the hosting entities are no longer operating.
 

Richard

Why am I not surprised? In the PKT he professed a distaste for divination and seemed to want to distance himself from it, but some of the material in the Manual strikes me as the most vulgar form of charlatanry, the very type he was decrying in connection with tarot. Looks to me like he was tryng to make a buck (well, a pound or two) off of both worlds, by cross-referencing his own pseudonymous writing.......
Shame on Waite. That's reprehensible.
 

Richard

Do we have a "tongue-in-cheek" emoticon here? I must go look . . .
Okay, perhaps the very tip of the tongue was ever so slightly touching the cheek. There is an acronym, TIC, but it is useless because there are a gazillion other meanings for TIC, such as Technologies de l'information et de la Communication.

Actually PKT would be intrinsically inconsistent regarding divination, even if there were no references to Grand Orient. Anyhow, I suspect that most people skip the turgid prose of the commentaries and introductions and go straight to the divinatory meanings. It would be easy to use the book without ever suspecting that Waite was ambivalent about divination.
 

Barleywine

Actually PKT would be intrinsically inconsistent regarding divination, even if there were no references to Grand Orient. Anyhow, I suspect that most people skip the turgid prose of the commentaries and introductions and go straight to the divinatory meanings. It would be easy to use the book without ever suspecting that Waite was ambivalent about divination.

That's what I did the first time I read it back in the 1970s. Now I'm older (and grimmer) than I was then so I'm actually reading for content this time through. How else would I have seen that ghostly hint of humor in his remark about Temperance alluding to the extinction of lights in the tavern? The last thing I would have suspected Waite of was humor. His obviously inflated sense of self-importance would seem to have ruled that out. So I'm learning something about the man, if not about the tarot at this late date.
 

Richard

I tend to cut Waite a little slack. Perhaps his seemingly inflated sense of self-importance was a defense mechanism due to feelings of inferiority on account of his being largely self educated in comparison to other GD notables. Also, Mary Greer conjectures that he may have had Asperger's Syndrome.
 

Barleywine

I tend to cut Waite a little slack. Perhaps his seemingly inflated sense of self-importance was a defense mechanism due to feelings of inferiority on account of his being largely self educated in comparison to other GD notables. Also, Mary Greer conjectures that he may have had Asperger's Syndrome.

I see your point. I was tainted by Aleister Crowley early on, who seemed to take enormous pleasure in trying to personally demolish Waite with sarcasm (Edwin Arthwaite, indeed!). For his part, Waite seemed to have no love for Crowley, whom I'm sure he saw as an upstart, an insurrectionist and an "all-around Bad Person," but his forays seemed less personally targeted, lumping Crowley in with the general lot of people Waite thought were posers. But I've mostly seen Crowley's side of the picture since I haven't sought out much of Waite's other writing except The Holy Kabbalah (Yikes! I think I'd rather try to read Mathers) and perhaps a monograph or two I can't remember. To be fair, once past the bombast of the first part of the PKT (but still in the narrative and not the "divination cookbook"), it's a more worthwhile read.
 

Zephyros

I actually find the PKT a highly annoying read. Published almost ten years after the secrets of the GD were revealed, it is strangely anachronistic, hinting at things that would already have been common knowledge to anyone with half an interest in them. The things he so famously hints at can easily be derived from other sources, while he refrains from discussing what is really important, the things unique to this deck and his own worldview. All of the GD stuff is a piece of cake compared to that, and he hardly mentioned it.